McGuinness: The Slippery Shadow in Irish Dirty War

[TomSea]

McGuinness: The Slippery Shadow in Irish Dirty War
By Toby Harnden   March 31, 2017

Towards the end of my time as a reporter in Northern Ireland I had a dream in which I was opening an envelope. In it, I had been told, was a list of all the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries who had been secret agents for the British intelligence services.

Even in the dream it felt as if all my senses were tingling in anticipation of being given the key to unlocking the greatest mysteries and contradictions of the Irish Troubles. But when I took the piece of paper out and unfolded it, it was blank.

That was in the late 1990s. I had a similar sense of anticlimax when — nearly 18 years on — the death of Martin McGuinness at the age of 66 was announced last week.

There were the inevitable salutes, cloaked in a green mist, to his status as a sainted Irish revolutionary hero. And of course the equally predictable condemnations of him as a blood-soaked terrorist who should rot in hell.

Between these extremes was the comfortable narrative of the type beloved by western liberals that here was a man of violence who laid down his gun and instead took up the cause of peace and democracy in a Damascene conversion.

Continued: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/03/31/mcguinness_the_slippery_shadow_in_irish_dirty_war___133488.html